The news media are like a can of Redi-Whip, churned into a self-consuming froth of sweet, tasty panic at the press of a button. After several years of waiting patiently, the H5N1 bird flu has pretty much been written off once and for all as a threat to anybody except, you know, birds. But, they still had all that pre-produced material ready to roll on a moment’s notice for it, so the instant the people from WHO started saying the H1N1 swine flu in Mexico was going to be widespread, the news people didn’t wait even a fraction of a second to squeeze the nozzle and start spewing.
I guess that whole “World Economy Headed Into The Shitter” story wasn’t enough to keep their dicks hard any more.
Part of the problem, I think, is the overblown impact of the word “pandemic”. There is a sensibility that says “OHMIGAWD, pandemic!!!!!! We’re all gonna die!!!”, but quite technically “pandemic” merely means that cases of the disease have been found in a very wide geographical dispersal. By comparison, the word “epidemic” in its technical sense means a number of cases in a single location. The media and the public both tend to misinterpret the word to mean that everyone will get the disease, but the terms are reflective of geographic spread, not number of cases. We have learned to associate the word “pandemic” with massive outbreaks like the 1918 Spanish Influenza, without recognizing that the number of cases (and resulting deaths) in that outbreak were freakishly huge and came in an era of much less effective medical treatment.
WHO raised the level of their alert based on criteria that account for the geographic spread — 11 countries on 3 continents to date — and the increased ease of human-to-human transmission. Phase 4 of the WHO alert protocol marks an uptick in the ease of transmission, which is a likely factor for an increased number of cases, but NOT an inidcation of any imminent mass die-offs of vast swaths of humanity.
(Oh, and for what it’s worth, the highly-touted bird flu that was going to kill us all, has still had fewer human cases after five years than the current swine flu has had to date just in Mexico. You can all stop holding your breath for that one.)
What has health officials worried is the severity of the cases in Mexico and the resultant death toll, but outside of Mexico the severity of the illness seems to be completely equivalent to the usual seasonal flus. The lessening of the severity coupled with the increase in ease of transmission generally implies that even at “pandemic” levels the disease will not pose a significant lethal threat because it has been mutated into a form that human immune systems can adequately resist. I’ve been reading people freaking out about the “cytokine storm” reaction, which is thought to have been a significant factor in the lethality of the 1918 pandemic, but given the already-moderated severity of the flu, the deaths triggered by cytokine reactions are likely to stay centered around the epicenter of the outbreak rather than becoming commonplace.
Those of us old enough to remember Jerry Ford’s swine flu debacle in the mid-1970s will recall that similar dire warnings were given out, and the entire public health infrastructure of the country was mobilized to distribute vaccine, only to have exceedingly few cases turn up and only one fatality, while the vaccine itself caused a number of illnesses and several deaths. More recent considerations of that event cast a favorable view on the ability of the public health sector to mobilize for endemic illness, despite the problems that arose with the tainted vaccine, and while Ford took a public relations hit then, historians now tend to put a more positive spin on his decision-making. As of today, the Obama Administration has had little to say publicly except to assure people that President Obama himself is in good health after visiting Mexico a few days ago and coming into contact with someone who apparently died of the flu. The Obama people are much more circumspect about diving into the middle of “panic/scandal of the day” media blitzes, and maybe that will help quell the frenzy.
As for me, I am going to grill some pork chops for dinner and maybe go out for Mexican at lunch. I am a good doo-bee about washing my hands, and don’t spend a lot of time hanging around with pigs, so you won’t catch me at the mall wearing a face mask and spraying Lysol everywhere I go.
